Since the end of 2006, Omnicom Group’s smaller rivals WPP Group and Publicis Groupe have struck out aggressively to acquire digital ad shops, while Omnicom has tended toward smaller investments like the purchase of interactive marketer C2 Creative, or taking a stake in New Zealand web designer Shift and virtual world ad specialist Millions of Us.

With companies like Digitas, 24/7 Real Media and Razorfish getting snapped by other ad holding companies, there is a perception that Omnicom has been watching from sidelines. Jonathan Nelson, Omnicom’s digital CEO, says that’s not the case. In fact, he argues that Omnicon actually beat its rivals to the acquisition game when you consider the big digital ad shop buys it made in the late 1990s.

Part of his new mandate, with the introduction of Omnicom Digital this week, will be to find new companies to invest in and buy. He says the company is ready to do some acquiring now that prices have come into line, though CEO John Wren has made similar pronouncements last year and the year before. In a sense, the new Omnicom unit combines the attributes of WPP’s interactive investment arm, WPP Digital, in terms of scouting for deals, and Interpublic’s Mediabrands, which was created to develop in-house technologies and instill greater coordination among its media buying shops. Read on for our full interview with Nelson.

paidContent: How is Omicom Digital different from OMG Digital, which was formed two years ago as the company’s in-house creative digital unit? Will anything change at Omnicom’s other digital agencies like Agency.com and Tribal DDB, or the digital media divisions of PHD and OMD?

Jonathan Nelson: We work in conjunction with OMG Digital and all the other agencies. Nothing will change at those other units. Our concept is that digital is not a department at Omnicom. My role is to sit at the holding-company level—not the agency level—and advise across all of them and integrate them even further. I founded Organic about 16 years ago and sold the company to Omnicom in 1998. We’re still there. But over the years, I’ve gotten much more involved working with [Omnicom CEO] John Wren and each of the operating units to try to get them to be more digital.

So Omnicom Digital is not meant to displace OMG Digital, correct?

No, not at all. [OMG Digital] Matt Spiegel, who I’ve been working with for years, is still doing what he’s doing. There’s no change. I’m not looking at day-to-day account work. I’m looking the M&A strategy, examining the sort of technological development we need to be looking at. The role also contains a lot of education and evangelism.

Will you be hiring a staff?

I work with a lot of people at our offices in Asia and Europe. We’re a pretty lean organization and I’m not here to build out a massive staff.

When it comes to spurring more collaboration, how should the agencies be more aligned?

My belief is that companies like Omnicom have huge amounts of resources to bear on the clients’ equations. No one company can really do everything. Digital starts to give a common platform to do work, such as analytics and media. Bringing all these things together is when you really access the power of the network.

Has Omnicom, the largest of the ad-holding companies, been eclipsed by Publicis Groupe and WPP Group, which have continued to make high-profile acquisitions over the past three years? Why has Omnicom seemed to have hung back from all the digital M&A activity of the past few years?

Omnicom made a lot of investments very early in the digital game, Organic being one of those early investments along with Agency.com. We got serious about digital acquisitions in 1997, 1998. As a result, we had a much deeper platform. We’ve also had a huge amount of success growing businesses organically, in-house. Tribal was a start-up inside DDB. In my opinion, you get a much more tightly woven fabric when you create a start-up within a company, as opposed to patching acquisitions together from the outside. We start by asking what the culture of an agency like DDB and then asking what the digital manifestation of that culture is.

We also believe that prices have been quite high for a lot of the digital companies. Because people here were very prescient about digital back in the 1990s, we didn’t need to go out there and start making huge acquisitions and then have to justify them to the marketplace.

So looking outside, what sort of companies do you want to acquire? Analytics looks like a hot area right now, with Adobe’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) and WPP’s purchase of TNS.

We’re looking at specialty areas, and analytics is certainly something we have our eye on. We’re very interested in social media, for obvious reasons. We’re also looking at specific geographies. And we’re just looking at what comes along. Sometimes, a really great agency comes on the market.

In terms of geographies, are you looking at any particular regions? A number of companies say they’ve given up on the U.S. and western Europe and are looking to Asia and Latin America.

The focus isn’t that narrow—we’re looking at the entire world. We’re not saying, “North America is done, put a fork in it.” We’ve got multiple networks and each of them have strengths and weaknesses and my role is to say how do we find complements that give our companies a wider global base.

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